British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE)

British Academic Written English Corpus (BAWE)

http://wwwm.coventry.ac.uk/researchnet/BAWE/Pages/BAWE.aspx

The British Academic Written English corpus was collected as part of the project, 'An Investigation of Genres of Assessed Writing in British Higher Education'. The project was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. (2004 - 2007 project number RES-000-23-0800).

The corpus is a record of proficient university-level student writing at the turn of the 21st century. It contains just under 3000 good-standard student assignments (6,506,995 words). Holdings are fairly evenly distributed across four broad disciplinary areas (Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, Life Sciences and Physical Sciences) and across four levels of study (undergraduate and taught masters level).  Thirty main disciplines are represented.

The 2,897 texts in the corpus have been categorised into 13 broad genre families, including “essays”, “critiques”, “case studies”, “explanations”, “methodology recounts”, “problem questions” and “proposals”. 

Information about genre family, discipline and level is provided in the header for each assignment file, alongside other types of contextual information which did not influence collection policy such as gender, year of birth, native speaker status, and years of UK secondary education.

The corpus is available free of charge to researchers who agree to the conditions of use and who register with the Oxford Text Archive. Please contact Hilary Nesi (h.nesi@coventry.ac.uk) for further information, or if you have any queries or comments relating to the project.